George Little: Hunting snipes -- for real!

When we country boys with sunburned necks were too young to drive legally, finding someone gullible enough to take on a snipe hunt would have been as exciting as finding the last unicorn.

George Little

When we country boys with sunburned necks were too young to drive legally, finding someone gullible enough to take on a snipe hunt would have been as exciting as finding the last unicorn.

Just one well-executed snipe hunt would have given us something to chortle about for months. We all knew the stories of taking a greenhorn into the woods with a gunny sack and telling him the snipes would come a runnin’ and jump into the sack as long as he kept whistling. That unfortunate was left in the woods until he was too dry to whistle or until he figured out that he had been had.

Loafing down on the crick bank, we planned a snipe hunt like it was the Normandy invasion. The biggest problem was timing. All of us lived quite a ways off the hard road. Unless somebody got hopelessly lost, no city slicker gullible enough to take the bait was ever going to show up.

Even with our vast 14-year-old outdoor knowledge, I don’t think any of us realized that snipes were real, and that there was a difference between going on a snipe hunt and actually hunting snipes. Unless you’re a really good shot, and really lucky at finding snipes, such experiences can leave you holding an empty bag.

A snipe looks a little like a downsized woodcock. It is colored differently but has the same squatty body and long bill. Like the woodcock, it likes to feed in wet areas where it’s easy to drill for worms.

Snipes migrate in flocks. They fly at night and feed in wetlands and wet prairies at dawn and dusk. Experienced snipe hunters go a field early and late in the day. The migrating flock disperses to feed. If you flush one snipe, chances are others scatter out nearby.

Common snipe season in Illinois opened Sept. 4 and closes Dec. 19. To go snipe hunting, you have to register with the Harvest Information Program, just like you do to hunt doves. If you’ve already registered to hunt migratory birds, you don’t have to do it again. The daily limit is eight. How realistic it is to limit out is debatable. I may not have seen eight snipes in the last three years.

Backwash.com says that when you flush a snipe, it accelerates to 45 mph in its first two seconds of flight.

“You get off the first shot pretty fast because of all the adrenaline, but you’ll probably miss,” the website says. “Then you take another shot on the wild chance the bird might get careless and fly in front of the gun. All of this takes about four seconds if the bird is an especially slow one.”

In light of that encouraging information, I’m shifting my focus from snipe hunting back to a snipe hunt. I’m going to scout out a likely snipe trail, get myself a gunnysack and wait for a city kid to come along.